Pressure cookers have been known and used for many years and have been utilized to cook diverse types of foods under both heat and pressure. In the fast food industry, pressure fryers are utilized to cook foods in cooking oil, the cooking oil serving to rapidly cook the food while retaining its natural moisture and flavor. Customarily, the food, such as fish or chicken, is dipped in a batter, breaded, and then placed in the cooker.
More recently pressure cookers have been developed in which the food is smoked as it is being cooked, the cooking vessel being provided with a smoke generator by means of which wood chips or other flavor producing ingredients may be charred to produce smoke which will permeate the meat and give it a distinctive taste. Such pressure smokers do not utilize cooking oil as a cooking vehicle, but rather rely on the moisture in the food being cooked to generate steam under pressure. By way of example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,906,191 and 3,583,307 teach pressure smokers as characterized above.
All known pressure smokers utilize aluminum cooking vessels which are highly heat conductive and hence rapidly heat the walls of the cooking vessel, including its bottom, the wall surfaces of the cooking vessel reaching temperatures as high as 700.degree. F. In commercial pressure smokers, the food being cooked is supported on a removable rack placed in the cooking vessel, the rack having a drip pan at its lowermost end which collects grease dripping from the meat. Due to the high temperatures within the cooking vessel, particularly at the bottom of the vessel, the drippings will tend to boil and vaporize, splattering oil on the walls of the vessel where it tends to char, thereby generating vaporized oil and grease smoke which permeates the meat and conflicts with the flavoring intended to be imparted to the meat by the wood chips or other flavoring ingredients.